[p2p-research] food speculation

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Paul:

though this has been reported in the news, here is the report outlining the
link between hunger deaths and riots and financial speculation.

I hope you can comment on it for our blog?

Michel


FOOD: HOW BANKSTERS STARVE THE POOREST PEOPLE
The most sickening of this month's reports is about food and finance. Jayati
Ghosh, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has found
that
the dramatic rise and fall of world food prices in 2007-08 was largely a
result
of speculative activity in global commodity markets. At the height of the
financial boom, he reports, so-called 'index investors' were thought to own
35
per cent of corn futures contracts, 42 per cent of soybean contracts and 64
per
cent of wheat contracts. 'Cultivators and food consumers appear to have lost
in
this phase of extreme price instability', he writes; the only gainers from
this
process were 'financial intermediaries who were able to profit from rapidly
changing prices'. Despite the recent fall in agricultural prices in world
trade,
food prices remain high and even continue to increase for vulnerable groups.
Yuk.
http://www.networkideas.org/working/dec2009/08_2009.pdf

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100713/2ca73564/attachment-0001.html>